Playing with Evolution. The second release candidate for
Evolution 1.0 was announced
last week. Evolution is at the core of Ximian's effort to produce a better
Linux desktop, so we thought it was worth a close look. Here's a first set
of impressions.

Evolution is an integrated tool handling a number of desktop tasks:

Electronic mail

Calendar management

Contact management

The idea is, of course, that these three activities are closely tied to
each other, and the supporting tools should reflect that.

The first time a user runs the application, a short series of dialog
windows is presented, allowing the user to configure the application.
Mostly it has to do with how to send and retrieve mail. Evolution can
handle POP/IMAP servers, local mail spools, and qmail "maildir"
directories. It can also import mail setups from elm or Netscape, and
address information from GnomeCard. It would be nice if it could bring in
calendar entries from ical, if that capability does exist, it isn't
obvious how to access it.

The mail client is fully featured, at least from the point of view of
certain classes of users. The interface is completely graphical, of
course, with lots of mousing required to do most tasks. The usual mail
client activities - reading, sending, foldering, printing, etc. - are well
supported.

MIME mail, of course, is thoroughly implemented, helpful for those of us
who get lots of family pictures in the mail (screenshot). Also supported is HTML mail - your spam
never looked better. The Evolution designers felt that HTML mail support
was crucial, but they have taken a cautious approach to it. The client
will not send HTML mail unless explicitly configured to do so; there is
also a feature in the contact manager which can enable or disable HTML mail
on a per-recipient basis. If you chose to send HTML mail, there is a set
of basic formatting options available.

The HTML mail display is also, wisely, configured to never load images off
the net; to do otherwise opens up the user to a number of privacy
problems.

Other features include a threaded mail display (screenshot) and the ability to sort messages by a
number of criteria. There is also a built-in filtering capability with, of
course, a graphical window for defining filters. The feature to set up a
filter based on the current message is a nice one. Filters can be set up
to run automatically, or in response to an explicit command

The message search and "vfolder" capabilities make it easy to organize and
find messages. If you're forever trying to figure out where you put that
important note from six months ago, Evolution may make your life easier.

On the other hand, a number of features that long-time Unix mail users are
accustomed to are still missing. If there is any way to feed a message to
a shell command, it's not easy to find. The "burst" capability from MH is
a nice way to read digests, but Evolution does not have it. The ability to
"redistribute" a message with its original headers is missing - though
some, certainly, would consider that to be a positive feature. And, of
course, there is no non-graphical mode - a pain for people who have to get
at their mail over slow network links.

The calendar client (screenshot) is pretty much
what one would expect. It has the usual features, including nice support
for recurring events (though it can be a bit hard to find the first time).
There are hooks for sharing your availability information to a group, thus
allowing others to schedule your time without asking you. What fun.

The contact manager (screenshot) is a fairly
straightforward address book database. It comes thoughtfully preloaded
with Ximian's contact information.
It is possible to transfer contact information from email messages by
right clicking on email addresses within the mail client.

A few glitches remain. There appears, for example, to be no deterministic
way of knowing when Evolution will actually figure out that new mail has
arrived. It also has shown a bit of a tendency to leave behind stray
processes, with names like "wombat," when it exits. But, as a whole, it
seems quite solid and well developed. It may not be the Linux guru's
preferred mail system, but the pointy-haired boss will probably like it.
Evolution is a high-quality contribution to the free software community.

Dmitry Sklyarov update. Remember Dmitry? He's still in
trouble.... A case conference was held on November 26, with a few
outcomes of interest. In particular, it appears that the defense will be
mounting a constitutional challenge against the DMCA, among other tactics.
That increases the importance of this case (except, of course, for Dmitry
and family, who certainly found it important enough already). A successful
constitutional challenge could go a long way toward eliminating the DMCA
problem.

It will take a while to find out, though, as the wheels of the justice
system grind slowly along. The pre-trial hearings start in March, 2002; if
the case continues, the date for the real trial will be set on
April 15. So a real resolution of this case (without appeals and
such) isn't likely before the (northern hemisphere) summer.